Graphics flurry may leave you blurry

Last fall, Nvidia assured me that the bulk of its 0.13-micron-manufacturing woes were over and that I should expect a blizzard of GeForce FX proliferations in the coming months (see "Graphics tit for tat turns topsy-turvy," EDN, Dec 12, 2002, pg 20). Coincident with this month's Game Developer Forum in San Jose, CA, the company is following through on its promises.

A higher yielding and, therefore, lower priced variant has joined the 500-MHz GeForce FX, which now sports a clarifying 5800 Ultra moniker. The non-Ultra GeForce FX 5800 runs on 400-MHz core and memory clocks. Nvidia estimates that 128-Mbyte boards based on the non-Ultra GeForce FX 5800 will cost $299.

With the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, Nvidia chops the number of rendering pipelines from eight in the GeForce FX 5800 to four and the number of pixel shaders from eight to six. The chip integrates a TV encoder, a DVI transmitter, and dual 400-MHz RAMDACs, and Nvidia estimates that 128-Mbyte boards will cost $199 when they appear early next month. The increasingly comprehensive MPEG-2 codec includes several features that its GeForce 4 predecessors lacked, including support for overlay gamma, adaptive deinterlacing, HDTV resolutions, video antialiasing, and encoding assistance, and its hardware-centric characteristics lower energy consumption. This attribute is particularly beneficial in the GeForce FX Go5600 mobile-PC variant, which replaces the DVI transmitter with an LVDS transmitter and targets systems costing $2000 to $3000. Both the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and the GeForce FX Go5600 employ 350-MHz core and memory clocks.

For the GeForce FX 5200, Nvidia has revisited the tried and true, previous-generation, 0.15-micron process, and the desktop Ultra version of the chip runs at 350-MHz core- and memory-clock rates. Nvidia has further reduced the number of pixel-shader pipelines from six in the 5600 to four in the 5200, and the company has also eliminated Z-buffer and color-compression support. As a result, 128-Mbyte graphics boards based on the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra will cost approximately $149 when they arrive in late April. The mobile-PC-targeted GeForce FX Go5200, intended for systems costing approximately $1500, runs at 300-MHz core and memory speeds. All GeForce FX proliferations include 128-bit memory interfaces and support DDR SDRAM and the AGP 8× bus.

Nvidia, 1-408-486-2000, www.nvidia.com.